Chris Hayes and I have something in common in the Strip

Chris Hayes of MSNBC and I don’t overlap much when it comes to politics, and his book sales are far higher than mine.

But our race-centric works of nonfiction are bumping against each other trying to attract eyeballs in the sidewalk display window of Bradleys’ Books in the Strip District.

Hayes’ premise in A Colony in a Nation is that white America mistreats its minorities as if they were a separate and unequal colony deserving of harsher laws and punishments, not true citizens.

My book is more about history — forgotten history. It’s centered on the year 1948, before the Civil Rights Movement came into being, when the top journalists and newspapers of the white North paid no attention to the hideous treatment of ten million blacks in the South.